The first test item is to hold a sit while a "friendly stranger" approaches and asks to greet her. That stinker popped up immediately. She's been perfect every time we practice. She's, in fact, been perfect on 9 of the 10 items even off-leash, her weakness being supervised separation. A friend has been coming over to help, but stood me up this week when it was crunch time. That was kind of a bummer and I think put me in a more stressful frame of mind-- I'd say I bear more than half the responsibility for our showing .

But she totally worked it as long as we were moving around, 100% focused on me and doing her job. This bodes VERY well for rally-o, which we start in 2 weeks. Greeting a new person and a new dog was just too much excitement.

But she graduated from the advanced class, and was a star especially considering her "home-schooling" She took one fairly worthless basic obedience class 2 years ago with a different trainer, but other than that it's been just us-- all the other dogs in the class were young and had taken a puppy or basic class with the trainer. My step-daughter's been coming to the classes, too, and she's been developing a great relationship with River and polishing her clicker timing. I'm really proud of them both!!

"In these bodies, we will live; in these bodies we will die.Where you invest your love, you invest your life." --Marcus Mumford

I can only please one person per day. Today is not your day, tomorrow doesn't look good either.
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"You didn't know of the magical powers of the break stick? It's up there with genies and Harry Potter as far as magic levels go." SisMorphine 01/07/07